WHEN you’ve scrambled back from the brink of extinction twice in the space of 18 months, ambitions tend to be severely restricted.

And having defied the odds to survive for a season and a half after their second great escape, Coventry Rugby Club are now talking in quietly-confident terms about stability and security rather than dreaming of the day they might recapture their status as one of the most successful clubs in England.

In the context of their recently straitened circumstances, finishing eighth in the third tier, National League One, represented a more than satisfactory achievement last season.

It’s only three years since a campaign spearheaded by the Telegraph’s John Wilkinson kept Coventry afloat and all that hard work seemed to have been wasted when owner Andrew Green suddenly announced he was pulling the plug.

“I remember it exactly,” said Peter Rossborough, a cornerstone of the great Cov side of the 70s and now their president. “It was November 30, 2009, when everything went up in the air and Andrew Green tried to liquidate the club. We had six weeks trying to sort things out and half-way through January we managed to acquire control.”

Although Cov stumbled to the end of the season, relegation from the Championship was inevitable – and as if their plight wasn’t dire enough, their rebuilding programme was put on hold by RFU red tape that cost them nearly two months planning time and around £70,000.

“Even though all our games were finished by the end of April and we weren’t involved in the play-offs, they deemed that every club had to pay its players until the end of May,” explained Rossborough.

“We managed it but it did leave us with pretty crippling debts to be honest. And because the RFU couldn’t decide between us and Birmingham & Solihull who was going down, we didn’t really know which league we were going to be playing in until some time in June.

“That meant we couldn’t start recruiting until the end of June/beginning of July so the pre-season preparation was chaotic – I think we finished up with something like 60 players having trials and that sort of thing.

“A lot of praise has got to go to our coaches, Phil Maynard, Dave Addleton, Peter Glackin and Barry Evans, who all worked their socks off to get the team sorted out in time for the first game in September.

“We wanted to make sure we survived in that league because a number of clubs who had been relegated from the Championship, including the likes of West Hartlepool and Orrell, just plummeted down the leagues.

“We had to make sure that didn’t happen and secondly, perhaps more importantly, we had to ensure that we stayed in reasonable financial health. And thanks to the coaching staff, who were absolutely brilliant, we managed to achieve both objectives.”

The income half of the equation was achieved on average gates of around 850, second only to Redruth in League One but clearly nowhere near sufficient on its own.

“We got up to 1,400 for one of two or the bigger games, which is very good for this league,” said Rossborough, “but one of our main targets is to increase membership.

“We need revenue from other sources and fortunately we have had shareholder patrons investing £10,000 and some incredible support from our two major sponsors, Jaguar-Landrover and Unipart Logistics.

“We are very lucky to have extensive conference facilities at the Butts Park Arena and we have been expanding that side of the business in partnership with Coventry & Warwickshire Chamber Of Commerce.

“We’ve come a long way but we are still aiming to push it further, maximise income from that source.”

Coventry fans would be less than human if they didn’t cast envious eyes down the road to Rugby where former Lions player Michael Aland has hired Neil Back to spearhead a hugely-ambitious plan to restore the club to its former glories.

But Rossborough insisted: “I’m really pleased that the Lions have found this backing because they have had as many ups and downs, if not more, as us down the years.

“I worked in Rugby for over 20 years and I’ve got a lot of affinity for the place, a lot of friends, so I wish them very well in what they are doing.

“It might make it a bit harder for us to recruit the players we want because we’ll be fishing in the same pool for a while but I hope everything works out for them. You only need to look at the Premiership to realise that nobody gets anywhere near the top without a substantial backer and if somebody came riding over the horizon we’re obviously not going to reject it out of hand – but we would be very wary of returning to the situation whereby Coventry Rugby Club was owned by a single person.

“We set up a charity, the Coventry Rugby Foundation Ltd, and we intend to put the majority of the shares, 51-per-cent, into that.

“If somebody wants to buy out the other 49-per-cent that’s fine but not a controlling interest.

“We’re not the least bit precious, let alone power mad. If other people can think of better ways of running the club, we’ve got no qualms about stepping aside.

“But although our supporters want us to be successful they don’t want the wrong people to come into control of the club so it’s a very delicate balance we’re trying to strike here.

“The current directors really do see themselves as custodians of the club and the great tradition of rugby in Coventry and we aren’t going to do anything that would endanger that.”